Fans have been scoring baseball games using shorthand developed to track every hit, put out and pitch since the sport's early days. Author and newspaper reporter Henry Chadwick is credited with developing the position numbers and abbreviations used today. Chadwick used the letter S for "sacrifice," and needed a different notation for strikeout. "Struck" was the common term for strikeout in Chadwick's day, so he used its last letter, K, as the symbol for strikeout.
Scorecard
Programs and scorecards have been around since the early days of baseball and older ones can be collector's items. Typically sold at MLB parks, programs contain team rosters, articles, a scorecard and advertisements. According to Frank Ceresi, former curator of the National Sports Gallery, Harry M. Stevens, an Ohio salesman, was the first to market preprinted rosters he called "score cards" to MLB teams as a way to help fans keep score.
Henry Chadwick
Referred to as the "Father of Baseball," Henry Chadwick, 1824-1908, was a 1938 inductee into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in its third year. Chadwick's Hall of Fame biography states that he "developed the modern box score, introduced statistics such as batting average and ERA, wrote numerous instructional manuals on the game, and edited multiple baseball guides." Chadwick's love for the game and his work promoting it helped baseball gain its reputation as America's national pastime.
K Is for Strikeout
Different people use different methods to keep score and the abbreviations they use are varied. Official scorekeepers for Major League Baseball use "SO" to record strikeouts, according to the MLB website "Baseball Basics: Abbreviations." The same site lists "K/9" for strikeouts-per-nine-innings and "K/BB" for strikeout-walk ratio. However, MLB's site "Baseball Basics: How to Keep Score" suggests using "K" to record swinging strikeouts and backward "K" for called strikeouts. Baseball Almanac uses "K" for strikeouts, "Kc" for called strikeouts and "Ks" for swinging strikeouts. Some scorekeepers may use a backward K for dropped third strikes which require a tag or putout at first base.
Why Keep Score?
There's no one reason why fans like to score baseball games, but if you look around the stadium during a game, you'll see lots of people doing it. Keeping score is a good way for fans to feel engaged by and get involved in a game. A scorecard tells the story of each game you attend and is a memento you can take home with you. If you'd like to score games and don't want to buy a program, you can purchase score books from sporting goods stores, create your own or download one from numerous websites.
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